fzf VS ripgrep

Compare fzf vs ripgrep and see what are their differences.

fzf

:cherry_blossom: A command-line fuzzy finder (by junegunn)

ripgrep

ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore (by BurntSushi)
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fzf ripgrep
405 348
59,462 44,747
- -
9.5 9.3
5 days ago 6 days ago
Go Rust
MIT License The Unlicense
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

fzf

Posts with mentions or reviews of fzf. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-10.
  • pyfzf : Python Fuzzy Finder
    2 projects | dev.to | 10 Mar 2024
    fzf : https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
  • Command Line Fuzzy Search
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2024
  • So You Think You Know Git – Git Tips and Tricks by Scott Chacon
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Feb 2024
    Those are the most used aliases in my gitconfig.

    "git fza" shows a list of modified/new files in an fzf window, and you can select each file with tab plus arrow keys. When you hit enter, those files are fed into "git add". Needs fzf: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

    "git gone" removes local branches that don't exist on the remote.

    "git root" prints out the root of the repo. You can alias it to "cd $(git root)", and zip back to the repo root from a deep directory structure. This one is less useful now for me since I started using zoxide to jump around. https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide

  • Which command did you run 1731 days ago?
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jan 2024
    > my history is so noisy I had to find another way

    The fzf search syntax can help, if you become familiar with it. It is also supported in atuin [2].

    [1]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#search-syntax

    [2]: https://docs.atuin.sh/configuration/config/#fuzzy-search-syn...

  • Z – Jump Around
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    You call it with `n` and get an interactive fuzzy search for your directories. If you do `n ` instead, it’ll start the find with `` already filled in (and if there’s only one match, jump to it directly). The `ls` is optional but I find that I like having the contents visible as soon as I change a directory.

    I’m also including iCloud Drive but excluding the Library directory as that is too noisy. I have a separate `nl` function which searches just inside `~/Library` for when I need it, as well as other specialised `n` functions that search inside specific places that I need a lot.

    ¹ https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

    ² https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

  • alacritty-themes not working any more!!!
    6 projects | dev.to | 7 Jan 2024
    View on GitHub
  • Fish shell 3.7.0: last release branch before the full Rust rewrite
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2024
    I do find the history pager stuff interesting, but ultimately not of tremendous use for me. I rebound all my history search stuff to use fzf[1] (via a fish plugin for such[2]), and so haven't been aware of the issues

    [1] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

    [2] https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish

  • Ugrep – a more powerful, ultra fast, user-friendly, compatible grep
    27 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Dec 2023
    You can also use fzf with ripgrep to great effect:

    [1]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/blob/master/ADVANCED.md#usin...

  • Tell HN: My Favorite Tools
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Dec 2023
  • A Practical Guide to fzf: Vim Integration
    2 projects | /r/commandline | 29 Nov 2023
    There are two plugins allowing us to use fzf in Vim: the native fzf plugin directly installed with fzf, and fzf.vim. The second plugin is built on the first one.

ripgrep

Posts with mentions or reviews of ripgrep. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-17.
  • Ask HN: What software sparks joy when using?
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2024
    ripgrep - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
  • Code Search Is Hard
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Apr 2024
    Basic code searching skills seems like something new developers are never explicitly taught, but which is an absolutely crucial skill to build early on.

    I guess the knowledge progression I would recommend would look something kind this:

    - Learning about Ctrl+F, which works basically everywhere.

    - Transitioning to ripgrep https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep - I wouldn't even call this optional, it's truly an incredible and very discoverable tool. Requires keeping a terminal open, but that's a good thing for a newbie!

    - Optional, but highly recommended: Learning one of the powerhouse command line editors. Teenage me recommended Emacs; current me recommends vanilla vim, purely because some flavor of it is installed almost everywhere. This is so that you can grep around and edit in the same window.

    - In the same vein, moving back from ripgrep and learning about good old fashioned grep, with a few flags rg uses by default: `grep -r` for recursive search, `grep -ri` for case insensitive recursive search, and `grep -ril` for case insensitive recursive "just show me which files this string is found in" search. Some others too, season to taste.

    - Finally hitting the wall with what ripgrep can do for you and switching to an actual indexed, dedicated code search tool.

  • Level Up Your Dev Workflow: Conquer Web Development with a Blazing Fast Neovim Setup (Part 1)
    12 projects | dev.to | 16 Mar 2024
    live grep: ripgrep
  • Ripgrep
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Feb 2024
  • Modern Java/JVM Build Practices
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2024
    The world has moved on though to opinionated tools, and Rust isn't even the furthest in that direction (That would be Go). The equivalent of those two lines in Cargo.toml would be this example of a basic configuration from the jacoco-maven-plugin: https://www.jacoco.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/examples/build/pom.x... - That's 40 lines in the section to do the "defaults".

    Yes, you could add a load of config for files to include/exclude from coverage and so on, but the idea that that's a norm is way more common in Java projects than other languages. Like here's some example Cargo.toml files from complicated Rust projects:

    Servo: https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/main/Cargo.toml

    rust-gdext: https://github.com/godot-rust/gdext/blob/master/godot-core/C...

    ripgrep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/Cargo.toml

    socketio: https://github.com/1c3t3a/rust-socketio/blob/main/socketio/C...

  • Ugrep – a more powerful, ultra fast, user-friendly, compatible grep
    27 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Dec 2023
    I'm not clear on why you're seeing the results you are. It could be because your haystack is so small that you're mostly just measuring noise. ripgrep 14 did introduce some optimizations in workloads like this by reducing match overhead, but I don't think it's anything huge in this case. (And I just tried ripgrep 13 on the same commands above and the timings are similar if a tiny bit slower.)

    [1]: https://github.com/radare/ired

    [2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/discussions/2597

  • Tell HN: My Favorite Tools
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Dec 2023
  • Potencializando Sua Experiência no Linux: Conheça as Ferramentas em Rust para um Desenvolvimento Eficiente
    5 projects | dev.to | 12 Dec 2023
    Explore o Ripgrep no repositório oficial: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
  • Scrybble is the ReMarkable highlights to Obsidian exporter I have been looking for
    9 projects | /r/RemarkableTablet | 7 Dec 2023
    🔎🗃️ ripgrep or ugrep (search fast, use regex patterns or fuzzy search, pipe output to bash/zsh shell for further processing V coloring)
  • RFC: Add ngram indexing support to ripgrep (2020)
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Nov 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing fzf and ripgrep you can also consider the following projects:

peco - Simplistic interactive filtering tool

telescope-live-grep-args.nvim - Live grep with args

zsh-autocomplete - 🤖 Real-time type-ahead completion for Zsh. Asynchronous find-as-you-type autocompletion.

fd - A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'

z - z - jump around

ugrep - NEW ugrep 5.1: an ultra fast, user-friendly, compatible grep. Ugrep combines the best features of other grep, adds new features, and searches fast. Includes a TUI and adds Google-like search, fuzzy search, hexdumps, searches nested archives (zip, 7z, tar, pax, cpio), compressed files (gz, Z, bz2, lzma, xz, lz4, zstd, brotli), pdfs, docs, and more

zsh-autosuggestions - Fish-like autosuggestions for zsh

the_silver_searcher - A code-searching tool similar to ack, but faster.

mcfly - Fly through your shell history. Great Scott!

alacritty - A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator.

ranger - A VIM-inspired filemanager for the console

python-regex-cheatsheet - Python 2.7 Regular Expression cheatsheet, as a restructured text document and Makefile to convert it to PDF